Multitasking leads to failure

In this age and time, we are surrounded by technology that was once a man’s dream and only part of Sci-Fi movies, now being part of our daily lives. Today our smartphone has a higher rate of processing power than all the computational power NASA had when man landed on the moon. Today we have this humongous amount of power at our fingertips and has given us some of the greatest advantages and has helped humanity to a very large extent.

Looking at it the other way is also interesting as it has done the same in the opposite. Today we have devices that can multitask and do a lot of things, handle messages while taking a high-resolution photo, download documents while watching a video, stream a live event or complete desktop. This has made us aware of the opinions of our near and far relatives, family, and friends that did not matter to us and we are seeing content that does not matter and have an information overload.

It has also resulted in a large number of people feeling that they have done work at the present and made them feel that they have not achieved much by the end of the day. This has resulted due to the access to information that one wants to learn about, other than when it would not be helping to accomplish the specific task he or she is doing at present.

An average person checks his smartphone for updates every once in twenty minutes and not being mentally present at that moment.

This also makes us less dedicated to our work and eats away our time.

Humans were never meant to multi-task, they are only good at doing that one thing at a time and that one thing was done very well.

Every day we decided that we should accomplish so much and fail. Due to this we go miles away from our goal and feel the time was not spent well.

We are not always aware that this is happening to us, you might be working on a document in your editor app and suddenly remember a video your friend was talking about the other day and instantly decided to watch that video, instead of finishing the document, just because the mind subconsciously finds tasks that have not been completed easier than the ones you are working on.

Later you realise that editing the document would take less than thirty minutes, but you ended up working on it for more than two hours, just because you sat there and decided let’s watch all the videos youtube recommended because they are only five minutes long, instead watched a whole playlist when you were supposed to go back and edit the document.

A study has shown that switching between multiple tasks instead of completing one, makes you feel mentally rewarded because your mind wants to work on easier takes and is fooled to believe, that it is easier to do other tasks than doing the current task, resulting in one checking his smartphone over and over again or opening the empty fridge doors to see if the tooth fairy has left some chocolates.

The only way one could fix this problem is by scheduling one’s workflow instead of scheduling one’s work itself. This will make us work on what we should be doing at present instead of what needs to be done. Resulting in doing what needs to be done at the moment and also by the end of the day you feel you have accomplished more, completed tasks, thereby browsing your smartphone or any other device more relaxed, because your mind is not prompting you into thoughts of what you should be doing and how much is left to do.